We hope to tease this idea out more in the coming weeks — please join us in conversation as we do so!

What conditions make women’s sports possible? Here, we dig into this question with a discussion of communicative capitalism and the broader commercialization of women’s sports, the gender pay gap, and previous league structures that predated the W.

Or, would you simply like to see George Bush almost get hit by a shoe?

Well, have we got the show for you.

Introducing The Dubya, an After Empire podcast about politics and women’s sports.

Next week, the WNBA 2025 season launches, and with it, an opportunity to have a broader conversation about the history of women’s athletics, the intersection between sport and empire, and why sports are such an important arena for political struggle. We also fully intend to enjoy a game or two, while we’re at it. Join us!

The learning curve for video is quite steep, and we are still figuring out the technical elements, but we want to make this a collaborative space that facilitates more interaction with our community. We have mainly functioned at a distance, intentionally avoiding the influencer model of “content” production. We remain committed to rejecting all “influencer” pretenses, though we will show our faces in our videos. We feel that this is an important standard to uphold given how corporate algorithms structure expression and blunt political clarity for the sake of attention-seeking ultimately attached to big tech data collection tied to consumerism.

Truthfully, the decision to create video content in today’s period of intense counterinsurgency is a risk. However, we have seen partisans across the world being willing to fight and to die for the liberation struggle. We must be prepared to do our part. With this restructured platform, we hope to make a contribution to the masses and honor the many heroes among us who continue to sacrifice and strive for life after empire.

If you are interested in joining us, please register here. Once you register, you will receive the complete schedule and list of materials.

All are welcome to join — this study group is for a mass audience of people with differing levels of political engagement and knowledge, yet who nonetheless wish to stand against exclusion, exploitation, and degradation.

Feel free to reach out with any questions (info@lifeafterempire.org) and please — join us!

Schedule: This group will meet weekly on Wednesday evenings, beginning Dec. 4th from 7-8:30PM via zoom. Currently, we have planned for a three week course (meeting Dec. 4th, Dec. 11th, and Dec. 18th). Depending on interest, we may resume weekly meetings on Jan. 8th, 2025.

Purpose: We recognize that people are afraid, enraged, in despair and experiencing other intense emotions. Our task is to steel ourselves and support one another for the struggle of our lives. Unlike 2016, we must do more than resist. This time, the goal is to govern. Our only demands are to ourselves. The first of which is to understand the strategies, techniques, and historical precedents of the enemy’s repression – and to develop measures to overcome them.

The first three sessions of this study group will be broadly oriented around the following themes:

• December 4th: Repression As Exclusion, Exploitation, and Degradation

• December 11th: Repression vs. Resistance: Techniques & Case Studies

• December 18th: How to Fracture Repression: Cultural Production and Democratic Methods

How to Prepare: For each week that we meet, a range of materials including academic articles, movies, music, poems, news articles, and other texts have been curated to provide a foundation and entry point for our shared inquiry. Additionally, every week we will provide resources on at least one focused case study that we will analyze using the tools and framework provided for that week. While you don’t need to read, watch, or listen to every single one of these to be able to participate each week, we suggest you select a few that capture your attention. Additionally, each week is framed with a topic and a series of questions – this provides a broad framework through which you should approach your preparation for our weekly meetings. All of the materials are hyperlinked in the schedule below.

Rules of Engagement: During our first meeting, we will discuss general rules of engagement as well as security protocols that we will be adhering to in this study group. However, After Empire operates this class with the belief that shared intellectual and political spaces should not be taken for granted – our time spent together is limited and should be appreciated as such. This study group is also a fundamentally social space – keep this in mind when participating in discussion (meaning, remember the purpose of the class as whole and orient yourself accordingly). 

As such, the three primary principles that anchor us are as follows:

1. Care for each other: be concerned with the experiences of your fellow participants

2. Love each other: identify with and appreciate your fellow participants

3. Help each other: be willing to assist and sacrifice for your fellow participants 

After Empire: This course is hosted and run by the After Empire Institute, a cultural apparatus and partisan think-tank. You can learn more about our work here. Our principles of unity include the following: 

Because of this, After Empire is leading a reading group on political repression and counterinsurgency. Although surveillance technology is a major tool of repression, we will be focusing on more insidious forms, particularly at the interpersonal, ideological, and institutional levels. 

Through a mixture of movies, television, and book excerpts we will explore reactionary repression across political movements, households, sexuality, and other relevant contexts. Our objective is to prepare ourselves to recognize reactionary repression both when it is happening to us AND when we perpetuate it. 

Additionally, we'll study contemporary repressive tactics, such as the crackdown on the Palestinian solidarity activists and the use of RICO to criminalize decentralized activist structures (Stop Cop City). 

The group will begin meeting weekly on Wednesday evenings at 7PM CST via zoom starting December 4th. Please register at this link, and you’ll receive information in the next week or so to help you prepare for our first meeting. Come prepared to engaged in participatory collective study and discussion.

If you see people struggling with the fear and uncertainty of this moment, get them to this call. Share this post widely and let’s rise to the crisis with purposeful community.

Feel free to reach out with any questions (info@lifeafterempire.org) and please — join us!

Contextualizing her analysis within a dual discussion of varying feminisms as well as historical myths that essentialize womanhood, Mies argues that the oppression of women is both situated within and a catalyst of the capitalist world economy.

Mies’ analysis problematizes both the capitalist world economy and socialist governance/ideology, particularly for the divergent modes in which they nonetheless dominate women. Focusing on the international division of labor, Mies argues that feminized categories such as the housewife are essential to capital accumulation, and that the ongoing reality of violence against women demonstrates that the so-called “woman question” is not a secondary matter unrelated to the forces of production.

Key Questions from the text:

1. What do women have in common?

2. What is the relationship between capitalism and violence against women?

3. What is the relationship between national liberation and women’s liberation?

4. What forms of production are required in a society that does not rely on the exploitation of women?

We highly recommend this book!

Ruth Sidel, a psychiatric social worker who worked with young children, went to China as a guest of the Chinese Medical Association. While there, Sidel visited nurseries, kindergartens, factories, and homes to understand how society was reorganized specifically to liberate women from the “bitter past” that existed prior to the 1949 revolution, when exploitation and domination structured society as well as the family system.

While the Communists, in their 1950 Marriage Law, “abolished arranged marriages, outlawed paying any price in money or goods for a wife, outlawed polygamy, concubines, and child marriage, prohibited interference in the remarriage of widows, and guaranteed the right to divorce for the wife as well as the husband,” this legislative change was simply a starting point. Workplaces, homes, and childcare were also restructured so as not to be predicated on the oppression of women — and these changes required an innovative mix of practical and ideological experimentation among the masses (22). This was not communism by decree — or what the revolutionary communists would criticize as “commandism.” Sidel’s report gives insight into the social process of women’s emancipation, as well as the revolutionary methods employed in the workplaces, schools, homes, and all levels of Chinese society.

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Let’s begin with Some Basic Facts About China. 

To understand what China is now, we need to understand the governance of Communist China in the past. This 1974 pamphlet is a tremendous start. It covers how China organized its rural communes, its urban centers, its medical system, among other economic questions in accordance to communist ideology. It’s an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how socialist power works in practice and how one governs transformational political processes. 

The China of that 1974 pamphlet doesn’t exist anymore! China is no longer communist, and it hasn’t been communist since the 1970’s. For some, the notion that China – a nation ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – has not been communist for nearly fifty years may come as a shock. Others may vehemently disagree. However, we really need to accept the fact that communism was defeated in China if we are to accurately assess the Cold War hype. 

What is China Now?

China is fully integrated with the capitalist world economy. In the 1970’s the CCP overthrew communism for what they termed Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, a euphemism for capitalist rule and a phrase the CCP continues to use to this day. At the time that the CCP initiated capitalist rule, the capitalist world economy was suffering a major structural crisis. Capitalist profits were falling amidst mounting costs and popular unrest. In the 1970’s the United States instituted new political controls, now known as neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus. These efforts at jump-starting the profit-rate and reinstituting capitalist legitimacy were only possible because the CCP overthrew communism and imposed capitalist rule on China.

The economist Minqi Li describes this process:

In response [to the post-1968 structural crisis], the global capitalist classes organized a counter-offensive in the form of “neoliberalism.” In the meantime, China, with its massive cheap labor force, has become the center of global capital relocation and the “workshop” of the world. China’s deeper incorporation into the capitalist world-economy helps to lower the global wage cost and restore the global profit rate. However, the neoliberal success has been limited. Global profit rates never returned to their previous high levels. Moreover, the neoliberal strategy turns out to be very costly for the global capitalist classes. 

For Minqi Li, geographic expansion has always characterized the capitalist world economy, but the incorporation of China is possibly capitalism’s final frontier.

Historically, the capitalist world-economy has responded to the pressure of rising costs through successive geographical expansions, relocating capital to new areas with lower costs. Obviously, this process cannot proceed indefinitely as sooner or later it will reach the maximum possible limit—the entire globe… China was one of the last large geographical areas to be incorporated into the capitalist world-economy… To use a military analogy, China had served as one of the large strategic reserves of the capitalist world-economy. 

China is not hostile to capitalism. In fact, China saved capitalism, on at least two separate occasions decades apart. First, when it overthrew communism and turned its millions of peasants into sweatshop slaves. Then again, in the wake of the financial collapse, when the CCP stabilized the Euro by using its massive dollar reserves that it had accumulated due to its decades of export production in order to rescue the free-falling currency.

China is the guarantor of the capitalist world economy.

What Was Chinese Communism?

To understand the magnitude of what was lost when communism was overthrown, we must appreciate just how drastic of a change it was.

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, had emphasized two key principles in economic development: balance and revolution. Under Mao’s leadership, the CCP sought to balance China’s economic growth, primarily by refusing to sacrifice agriculture for heavy manufacturing, while also prioritizing the continuation of the communist revolution. 

In this era, the CCP constructed many of its factories inland and in a decentralized network as a means of ensuring that they could maintain economic production while at war with imperialist powers. That is to say, revolution was paramount in economic planning, an example of the well-worn Maoist phrase politics in command. This policy had the secondary effect of resisting the urge to become an export economy, which would have prioritized centralized manufacturing in coastal provinces near ports. Had the CCP pursued the export path, it would’ve necessitated the betrayal of the peasants by rapidly pushing them into factory work for export, rather than continuing their prominent role in what was termed socialist construction.

The peasants had been the key supporters of the revolution both politically and in their massive participation in the victorious Red Army. After the CCP defeated the nationalists to unify China in 1949, the CCP used land reform to re-organize the peasants into rural communes, which were political-economic units that structured both economic production and political life in rural China.

When Deng Xioaping commenced the process of “opening up” in the 1970’s, these rural communes were dismantled, thus stripping the peasants – that is the masses of the Chinese people – of both their political power and economic role. Deng’s policy effectively liquidated the peasants. Millions of peasants were rapidly degraded into migrant laborers, many of whom wound up in newly formed Special Economic Zones, the first of which was founded in 1980. These Special Economic Zones were centralized manufacturing districts located in coastal provinces where free market capitalism hyper-exploited these former peasants in order to prop up the capitalist world-economy through cheap exports. Rather than politics in command, Deng ushered in a new era of profit in command — the essence of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

New Cold War or New World System

In the United States, media outlets and politicians refer to this mass enslavement of the Chinese people as “off-shoring” or “China stealing our jobs.” It’s delusional. This process was catastrophic at a world-historic scale, and the U.S. public is intentionally misled about it because to acknowledge it would call the entire social foundation of the country. Everything from consumer goods to the credit system we use to run up debt were all made possible by the overthrowing of communism in China and the resulting hyper-exploitation of its people.

China, essentially, wants a better return on its investment — like any emerging guarantor of the capitalist world economy. The United States is attempting to block its efforts. But that is not why China cannot be accommodated on revised terms. The more fundamental problem is that the capitalist world economy is in a terminal structural crisis that is accelerating by the day. Immanuel Wallerstein, a pioneer of world-systems analysis, identifies three “structural strains” that capitalism can no longer bear: 

(1) the deruralization of the world, ending capitalism’s ability to check the rising share of expenditure on labor power as a percentage of world total value created; 

(2) the ecological limits of toxification and nonrenewal of resources, limiting the ability of capital to reduce costs of inputs by continued externalization of these costs; 

(3) the spreading democratization of the world, evidenced by ever-expanding popular pressures for expenditures on health, education, and lifetime income guarantees, which have created a steady upward pressure of taxes as a share of world value created.

These intractable problems amount to a terminal decline of the capitalist world economy that cannot be overcome within the limits of the existing world system. A new world system must emerge to take this one’s place. It is the declining status of the capitalist world economy as a whole that makes the conflict between the U.S. and China fundamentally distinct from the Cold War with the Soviet Union – a point we will return to in our next installment. 

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

The sentiment is courageous but tragic. It calls upon the reader to stand tall and never admit defeat, never give up our dignity, whatever the odds, and whatever the cost. I did not know what was happening in Gaza, but I understood that Palestinians had once again raised their fists to fight back, and that they would suffer horribly for it. 

I passed the message along, and it was not well received. Did I know what Hamas had done? Would I stand for the killing and kidnapping of civilians? I was not prepared for these questions, and I responded in the way that most of the left has responded in the weeks and months since Oct 7, with a knee-jerk condemnation of Hamas, an organization that I knew very little about beyond its Islamist political ideology and its leading role in the attack. 

If my first impression of October 7th had been informed by Norman Finkelstein’s analogy to the Nat Turner rebellion, I may have responded differently. Finkelstein argued that Nat Turner had risen up against an unjust and immoral institution and that his rebellion involved the slaughter of women, children, and babies. Should Nat Turner be condemned for this atrocity? Finkelstein turned to Williams Lloyd Garrison for his answer. Garrison’s response to the rebellion was, essentially, I told you so. The abolitionists believed that evil was the necessary result of the unnatural and evil institution of slavery, and if the slaveholders did not heed this warning, they would suffer the consequences. By the same token, Finkelstein admitted that an atrocity had occurred, but he refused to condemn Hamas.

Had my first impression of Oct 7th been formed by reading Jodi Dean’s essay, “Palestine speaks for everyone,” I may have again responded differently. Like Finkelstein, Dean refused to condemn Hamas, and moreover, she has argued that this refusal is a basic condition of comradeship. Dean argues that by condemning Hamas, “the widely acknowledged and accepted leader of the struggle for a free Palestine,” left intellectuals “take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.” 

Those who condemn Hamas, says Dean, have taken a side against Palestinian liberation. Thus, Dean not only offers us her judgment as a means for informing our own, like Finkelstein does; she also asserts a political division between friends and enemies that nobody can ignore. Finkelstein asks us, are you a good person? Dean asks us, are you with me or against me? The questions rhyme, but they are not the same. Finkelstein’s argument interests me as a case of moral reasoning. I can face it abstractly, compare my intuitions, and work through the implications. Dean’s argument confronts me with a challenge, and it strikes me as both political and deeply personal, as a question of belonging to the communist movement. 

The differences in approach are reflected in the emotional tone and range provided by Finkelstein’s analogy and Dean’s essay. The affect of Finkelstein’s analogy is at turns cautious and haughty, blending muted scholarly distance at one moment with righteous anger at the next. Finkelstein assumes the point of view of Garrison, which suggests that he sees Garrison as a rough approximation of his own position in relation to Hamas. It is significant, then, that Garrison was not seeking liberation for himself. He stands in the position of the analyst, the judge, or the witness, but not the participant. Now consider again the title of Dean’s essay: “Palestine speaks for everyone.” In a twist on Finkelstein’s analogy, we are not now inhabiting Garrison’s icy rebuke but Turner’s fiery revenge. With Dean, we stand among the oppressed, the slaves marveling at Turner’s bravery, or heeding his call to join the rebellion and turn the world upside down. Dean looks at the rebellion and says, the resistance fighters have done this for us, and we must become worthy of it. Finkelstein offers apologia, Dean offers a call to arms. 

The clarity of the question and the stridency of the emotional tone are what set Dean’s essay apart from everything else I’ve read on the war. It just feels different. Dean isn’t ashamed to feel energized by armed resistance. On the contrary, she insists that these are the appropriate feelings for people on our side of the line. Those who don’t feel this way are the enemy, or they have been effectively contained by the policing of appropriate emotion:

“Policing affect is part of the political struggle. Anything that ignites the feeling that the oppressed will break free, that occupations and blockades will end, must be extinguished. Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it.”

Here it is important to be specific about the claim that Dean is making. She clarifies that “Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution.” The “policing of affect” is not so much about our feelings toward Hamas; rather, it is about containing the feeling of openness, of revolutionary possibility. On this view, the significance of October 7 is its frontal attack on the feeling of despair among the Palestinian people, and all of us by extension. Millions of Gazans who yesterday dreamt only of “food security and open crossings” are confined to refugee camps and scavenging for their next meal today, but they are dreaming of victory. Millions more who had given up on Palestine have returned to the streets, declaring that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

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This is the argument that Immanuel Wallerstein lays out in various lectures and writings. 

For example, in a 2013 lecture at Yale University, Wallerstein states,

The United States lost the Cold War because the point of the Cold War was not to win it but to keep it going. Keeping it going was a great benefit to the United States in two essential ways. One, was that it created a mythical danger with which they could always menace Western Europe and tell them that you have to stick in line… And the second is that part of the deal with the Soviet Union is we’ll keep our guys in check, you keep your guys in check and then nothing will hurt the commitment that there’s not going to be any kind of nuclear war… When the Soviet Union, we lose both of those.

To understand this claim and its implications, we need to review two Immanuel Wallerstein articles that tell us what the Cold War was, and what resulted from the collapse of this global arrangement. 

What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretive Essay

The World System After the Cold War

These two essays work together to challenge the Cold War narrative by describing what the Cold War arrangement actually was in institutional and historical terms. Wallerstein places the Cold War, and U.S. post-Cold War power, within the grand arc of the capitalist world economy. Beginning in 1450, the capitalist world economy is the proper context for understanding geopolitics.

Understanding capitalism as a world system enables Wallerstein (and consequently his readers) to analyze and reliably predict political actions/dynamics as they unfold. Wallerstein’s analytical approach is a powerful tool for engaging the question of a New Cold War between China and the United States, or even the matter of the War in Ukraine. We will be returning to these ideas in the coming weeks.  

Let us know what you think. 

She tried to balance out this blatant warmongering with a mealy-mouthed critique that “U.S. aid to Ukraine has been wrongly tied to unconditional support for Netanyahu's assault on Gaza.”

It’s as craven as it is pathetic. AOC bloviating on about separating the Ukraine war vote from the Israel war vote was just a cynical pump fake wholly consistent with her role as controlled opposition within the liberal imperialist order.

Compare AOC’s imperialist apologia with the U.K.’s George Galloway, recently elected to parliament, who nearly two years ago exposed the war on Ukraine for the NATO-sponsored criminal racket it always has been:

AOC is like Jordan in the 80’s: fake left, go right. 

That’s a reference to the social media trend started by world-class hater and Lebron James superfan, Mike Peek. Like many opportunist influencers plucked from obscurity by social media algorithms, Mike Peek is an obnoxious buffoon. He has one note, but it rings true. For months now, each day Mike Peek has gone on Instagram to upload a video of himself watching old basketball games and shamelessly ridiculing basketball players of the 90’s, 80’s, and 70’s as he shouts various catch phrases at the screen. One slogan soars above all others. His go-to move: “We Done with the 90’s!”  

So, We Done With AOC!

Look at how aggressively AOC confronts a handful of protesters criticizing her weak-kneed approach to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza:

AOC was belligerent enough to get in the faces of these people asking her basic questions about her past remarks, a record she of course lied about in her dismissive retorts. But she didn’t have an ounce of this kind of aggression on January 6th. Instead of leading the charge against the reactionary siege of Congress that day, as she was duty-bound to do, she filmed herself cowering on Instagram and recounting stories of personal trauma from her past. Lindsey Graham showed more courage than AOC on January 6th! 

That’s BIG TRASH!

The U.S. has led the Ukrainian people by the nose into their collective slaughter, first by overthrowing their government in 2014 and then by flooding the country with arms and weapons systems in order to antagonize Russia. In the two years since the war began, U.S. battle tactics have failed on the ground, and NATO’s arrogant belief in their technological superiority has shattered against the reality of the weapons systems being destroyed almost as fast as they are deployed in many cases. 

U.S. militarist delusion has led to the wholesale destruction of the U.S.-trained Ukrainian armed forces. By 2024, the Ukrainian government was forcibly seizing disabled people to send to the front lines. The latest issue of Vogue Magazine betrays the desperation of the situation, as these PR vultures glamorize sending barely trained Ukrainian youth, kids really, to go die in a war they cannot win. 

At best, the U.S. used the slaughter of the Ukrainian people to test the battlefield capabilities of its tactics and weapons systems, similar to how the Germans and other imperialist powers tested weapons on the Spanish Republic in the buildup to World War II. These wars are crimes, and the Ukrainian people should not be treated as expendable pawns in a geopolitical gambit. AOC’s submission to imperialist war policy, particularly in how she slavishly recapitulates imperialist talking points without even bothering to repackage them in nominally socialist rhetoric, is an embarrassment of generational proportions. 

AOC is BIG TRASH!

So yeah, WE DONE WITH AOC!

Kneecap, an Irish rap group from Belfast, is seeking to change this. Made up of Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh), Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin), and DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh), they rap in a mix of Irish and English. Although the use of local, regional, or ethnic colloquialisms has a long history within hip-hop, Kneecap imbues this practice with a conscious anti-imperialist ethic that directly challenges the ongoing British subjugation of Ireland. 

Who Is Kneecap?

Kneecap utilizes music and cultural production as a means through which to cohere a distinct politic of Irish revolutionary nationalism, one that seeks to address the problems faced by the masses of the Six Counties today, both Catholic and Protestant, while arguing for the emergence of a united Ireland in which British occupation is no more. While Irish republican nationalism is generally embedded in Irish culture, Kneecap’s approach takes a unique 21st century orientation to longstanding questions of sovereignty, identity, and republicanism. They are the Ceasefire Babies, or children of the Good Friday Agreement. 

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a peace process brokered between the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the political parties of the Six Counties, ushered in a new political structure and a “promise… of economic opportunity, prosperity, and stability,” as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declared at the 25th anniversary celebration of the agreement. However, as youth who came of age following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, they’ve experienced a so-called peace in which death, poverty, exploitation, and degradation have remained entrenched for the masses, even among the Unionists in the North who continue to support British occupation. 

Kneecap emerged from a specific cultural and political context in Belfast, where reverberations of The Troubles shape everyday experiences. Their name, Kneecap, is an irreverent reference to a practice utilized by the New Irish Republican Army in which people (often accused of drug-dealing) are shot in the back of their kneecaps as a punishment. They also recently debuted the first Irish language film at Sundance Film Festival, winning the Audience Choice Award. The film stars the group alongside actors such as Michael Fassbender and depicts their experiences growing up in West Belfast and forming Kneecap.

Kneecap’s Revolutionary Nationalism

Though Kneecap often takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to the question of nationhood and peoplehood, there is strong political precedence for this politic in Ireland, found in the revolutionary nationalism of James Connolly and others. In Connolly’s 1897 essay, “Socialism and Nationalism,” he argues for an Irish republic free of capitalist tyranny, where all people are fully incorporated and where the Irish nation acts as a beacon of light for the oppressed around the world. Indeed, this is precisely the politic Kneecap has embodied lately with their consistent expressions of Palestinian solidarity, as After Empire discussed last week.

“A workers’ revolution is the way forward, rather than one based on a fucking god that may not even exist,” Mo Chara hurled this provocation during a recent appearance on The Late Late Show, a talk show broadcast by Ireland’s public television channel RTÉ. Mo Chara’s agnostic/atheist republicanism stands in stark relief against the very first line of the Irish Republic’s Constitution: “In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred.” With his remarks, Mo Chara not only criticizes the religious nature of the Republic, but also simultaneously implicitly rejects the religious framework through which British imperialism in the North is often articulated. 

The use of the phrase workers’ revolution carries a particular ideological history, as it’s basically the bat-signal for Trotskyism, though it is unclear if that legacy was intended to be invoked here. Nonetheless, Kneecap does make clear both in their RTÉ appearance and elsewhere that it is not simply a united Ireland that is needed, but rather the emergence of a new Ireland on a revolutionary political basis that fully incorporates all people living on the island. 

United Ireland for Whom?

What would such a united Ireland look like and how would it be achieved? 

The members of Kneecap have repeatedly stated in interviews that they have more in common with working class people living in the Shankill than the rich people or politicians in Dublin. The Shankill is a protestant working class neighborhood in Belfast known for its militant Unionist politics. Yet, Kneecap sees the people living and working in that neighborhood as part of a united Ireland.

In an interview with Vice, when asked if they had Irish or British passports (in the North citizens are able to choose), Mo Chara states,

“If I had a British passport, it would not make me any less Irish, but I think to have a British passport is to legitimize the 800 years of colonialism here.” In response to a follow up question about a united Ireland, Móglaí Bap responds, “And they can still be British or Polish or Japanese or whatever they want to be in Ireland. They’ll still have their identities.” 

While many might assume reuinfication would require the expulsion of all Unionists from the North, Kneecap takes a different approach. One of their most popular songs, “Get Your Brits Out,” offers an alternative to a politic of expulsion. Throughout the song Kneecap humorously fantasizes about taking prominent DUP (the leading Unionist party in the North) politicians out for a raucous night on the town. Thus, they “get their Brits out.” Though playful, the song still retains the phrase’s political meaning. At the end of the first verse, after referencing the DUP, they rap,

“Anois éist (Now listen), I’m gonna say this once / Yous can all stay just don’t be cunts / And don’t be runnin' round like silly old tans / Just take these yokes and we’ll go for a dance.'' 

Among the humorous sleights, the band’s reference to “silly old tans” is a callback to the Black and Tans. The Black and Tans were British soldiers recruited to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary during the British occupation of Ireland in the early 20th century.

This historical allusion to Black and Tans is given new life when one considers how exactly Kneecap was founded. Móglaí Bap and a friend were caught by police spray painting “cearta” (the Irish word for rights) on a bus stop the day before an Irish Language Act march in Belfast. Móglaí Bap ran, but the friend was caught and, only speaking Irish, had to spend the night in a cell waiting for an Irish translator. Such occurrences demonstrate the ways that “silly old tans” sectarianism is baked into the British imperial state structure governing the Six Counties. As a further act of defiance, Kneecap’s first song, “C.E.A.R.T.A.” was written to commemorate this protest. 

Kneecap’s admonition “don’t be cunts” references both the DUP and the silly old tans – the past and present of British imperialism in the North. The triple entendre of “Get Your Brits Out” captures the political specificity of Kneecap’s position – that everyone currently on the island of Ireland can stay, so long as they do not uphold the colonial politics of the British empire… and are willing to have a little fun.  

Irish Nationalism Goes International

What’s exciting about Kneecap’s revolutionary nationalism is that it is internationalist. Kneecap’s sentiment that everyone living on the island should be fully incorporated into it is one that is relevant not only because the emergence of a united Ireland is on the table, but also because it rejects nativism as a political basis for Irish republicanism and national liberation more broadly. While attending Sundance Film Festival, the members of Kneecap took part in a Palestine solidarity protest. Pictures from the event show DJ Próvaí holding an image of a woman wearing a hijab, a signifier of Muslim identity. Above the woman it reads, “Stop the Genocide.” Below her, in the foreground of the image, the poster says “We Are Not The Enemy.” 

Like their music, the protest had layers of meaning. First, it was an obvious act of solidarity with the Palestinian people during the Israeli assault on Gaza. The second meaning of the protest was a political intervention within Ireland, as the sentiment of “We are not the enemy” carries additional political valence in Ireland right now. Ireland, like many nations across the globe, is currently facing an influx of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Reactionary forces work to characterize the refugees and migrants arriving in the country as enemies. Rural towns across the island have been holding protests with slogans such as “Ireland is full” and “enough is enough.” Last year, Dublin faced riots after an Algerian man allegedly stabbed three children outside of a school. The double-meaning of Kneecap’s protest brilliantly captured in image and deed what we at After Empire (by way of Alain Badiou) have been saying: there is only one world. 

Some of us at After Empire have been enthusiastically watching Kneecap’s ascension over the last several years. While much is unknown about Kneecap’s specific political investments, we’re excited to platform, engage, and discuss the cultural forces pushing for a revolutionary approach to Irish reunification. 

Irish republicanism and Palestinian liberation have long had a shared affinity. For example, the Scottish soccer team Celtic was founded by and for Irish immigrants and for many years fan groups (ultras) have displayed Palestinian banners and flags during matches. Last fall, in the wake of the October 7th attack, and despite formal censorship by the club and the league’s governors, Celtic fans gave a rousing rendition of their anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while waving Palestinian flags in defiance of the ban.

In January 2024, Clare Daly, an Irish member of the European Parliament, gave a scathing rebuke of Joe Biden for his support of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing: “So take note, Butcher Biden, the ancestors of the Ireland that you claim to be from disown you. Keep our country out of your mouth.”

Just last week, the famous International Wall of murals in Belfast was transformed into a Palestine wall as a show of solidarity. Within this context of courageous Irish expressions of solidarity with Palestine, we anticipate what Kneecap will bring to its largest U.S. audience to date when they make their appearance on Fallon. 

Kneecap makes no bones about their republicanism, which features in their lyrics, on two murals they’ve put up in Belfast, and on DJ Próvaí’s ass (we’ll leave it to you to find the music video in question). During their recent trip to the US for the Sundance film festival, where their biopic premiered, all three members of the band participated in a protest in support of Palestine. In a post on X, they wrote that “the US is directly complicit in this genocide and enables it with consistent weaponry to a fanatical regime and a pathetic disregard of international law.” 

Then, in a February 2024 appearance on Ireland public television’s (RTÉ) Late Late Show, they forced a conversation on Palestine when DJ Próvaí “removed the jacket he had been wearing to unveil a jersey featuring an Arabic slogan and a Palestinian flag on the crest in support of the Palestinian people.” Prior to Kneecap’s appearance, RTÉ had formally demanded that the band not wear any pro-Palestinian insignias during the show. As the host tried to manage this disturbance, the band criticized Israel for perpetrating a genocide that has already killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom are women and children. They once again specifically mentioned U.S. military sponsorship of the mass slaughter.

It was a courageous act, particularly as a new band with so much momentum and even more to lose.

We expect nothing less from the boys, stateside on Fallon. 

The narrative goes something like this: In 2016, Trump saved America from migrant caravans by building The Wall. In 2020, Joe Biden stole the election and “turned our country into one giant sanctuary for dangerous criminal aliens.” According to Colonel Douglas McGreggor, a hardened reactionary who will potentially take a role in the coming Trump administration, Biden’s immigration policy has precipitated “a full-scale invasion of illegal migrants like we’ve never seen in our history.” But now, Trump is back, and he will do whatever it takes to enact a program of mass deportation that will purify the “blood” of the nation. 

When staring down a “full-scale invasion,” is any exception too great, any power too extraordinary, for the leader who is prepared to resolve the crisis? The office of “dictator” in ancient Rome was limited to six months, and Donald Trump has promised that he will only be a dictator on his first day in office. He hopes to accomplish a lot. As reported in the Washington Post, Trump’s day of dictatorship will begin with “an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.” His presidency will culminate in mass deportations on a scale unprecedented in history. 

Immigration has become one of the dividing line questions of the world. France, the UK, Germany, the United States, and even the social democratic states like Denmark and Sweden have for over a decade been increasingly defined by the immigration problem. Immigration is such an explosive paradigm because it exposes the fundamental political insanity of the capitalist world economy: the unity of production processes, but the separation of people. 

Alain Badiou summarizes the contradiction well in his 2007 book, The Meaning of Sarkozy. He writes:

“All the foreigners who arrive, live and work here are proof that the thesis of a democratic unity of the world realized by the market and the ‘international community’ is a complete sham. If it were true, we would have to welcome these ‘foreigners’ as people coming from the same world as ourselves. We would have to treat them as we treat someone from another region who stops over in our town, then finds work and settles there. But this is not at all what happens. The most widespread conviction, and that which government policies constantly seek to reinforce, is that these people come from a different world.”

The paradox is most striking in the United States. The United States is historically defined by discrimination against European Catholics/Jews, and of course the systematic exclusion of African-Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Indigenous peoples. However, unlike European countries, the United States was founded by multinational transatlantic settler-colonialism and often self-narrates as a nation of immigrants. Yet here we stand, one year out from a potential militarized occupation of U.S. cities, nation-wide anti-immigrant raids, and even the forced removal of U.S. citizens who are descendants of undocumented immigrants. 

The Trump campaign website promises that “In cooperative states, President Trump will deputize the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing illegal alien gang members and criminals.” And if that seems radical, Stephen Miller has claimed that these deputized National Guardsmen could even be deployed to non-cooperative states. Miller’s promise is that a Trump presidency will mean the end of sanctuary cities. 

The entire plan is reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in which African-Americans were required by federal law to be returned to slavery, even if they were located in a free state. The Act compelled free states to allow the federal government to enforce slavery within their territories. 

If Trump’s plan goes forward, Mayors and Governors in Democrat controlled states will then face a serious choice: to submit to this campaign of mass detention and expulsion of millions of people who live and work in our communities, or to resist the federal government by force. They will not resist in principle. At most, they will call for the humanitarian border to externalize the issue to a more distant frontier in order to more efficiently conduct the brutal crackdown on the most vulnerable section of the world’s dispossessed people.  

We all must face this dilemma. Undocumented people are our classmates, neighbors, coworkers, caretakers, family members, and friends. They are us. Will we allow military force and armed gangs to kidnap our people with impunity?

Badiou implores us to defy this reactionary tide by declaring, there is only one world. 

“To inscribe a politics of emancipation in the context of places – countries, for example – the best method is to assert first of all that there is only one world… The ‘world’ of unleashed capitalism and the rich democracies is a false world. Recognizing only the unity of products and monetary signs, it casts the majority of humanity into the devalued world of the ‘other’, from which it separates itself by walls and war. In this sense, there is not a single world today. To assert therefore that ‘there is only one world’ is a principle of action, a political imperative.”

Trump is planning to assemble a force and march on the municipalities, cities, and states in which some 11 million undocumented immigrants reside. We have at best, one year to prepare. Should Trump somehow be defeated at the polls, that does not resolve the matter. Dispossessed people living in the shadows as a non-person is an unacceptable degradation no matter what regime holds power. 

Join us in the coming months as we explore the immigration crisis, its relationship to the crumbling capitalist world economy, and the pressing issue of what is to be done. 

At the beginning of the year, Origin, a film based on the book, was released in theaters to critical acclaim. Starring Aunjanue Ellis as Wilkerson, Origin chronicles Wilkerson’s journey as she researched and wrote the book Caste. 

Given the attention that these companion texts have received, we’re selecting Caste and Origin for our March book club. 

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In Caste, Wilkerson attempts to identify and explicate the genesis for human created hierarchies across the globe. The book uses the concept of caste to connect antisemitism in Nazi Germany, white supremacy in the U.S., and caste in India. Both the conclusions and the analytical maneuvers Wilkerson makes throughout the book are, in our estimation, politically and factually misguided.

We did not choose this text in order to affirm its politics. We went back and forth regarding this book for so long that we missed the February book club announcement and now we’ve set it for March. However, Caste does offer us an entry point to discuss the cultural dimensions of imperialism and the capitalist world economy.

Despite our reservations, we encourage people to read and discuss this book. We will cover both the book and the film throughout March.